Ruck, Alan

Alan Ruck has a long career of 100+ stage and film/TV roles, topped by a seven-year run as mayoral chief of staff Stuart Bondek in the ABC comedy Spin City. But it is as Cameron Frye, the hapless, stressed-out best friend of the title character in John Hughes’ classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, that he will forever be most recognized and remembered.

And so it was that movie audiences were delighted to see Ruck turn up in 1994 as Capt. John Harriman, the able but still inexperienced captain of the newly launched U.S.S. Enterprise-B seen in the prologue of Star Trek Generations, at the helm of Captain Kirk’s final, ill-fated mission.The native of Cleveland, Ohio, born in 1956, had earlier played the best friend of Ferris co-star Matthew Broderick in the original Broadway production of Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues, and most recently was seen as Charlie Morse in NBC’s Persons Unknown.